The Lake Poets are a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement. The three main figures of what has become known as the Lakes School are William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey.

2.'I am the enemy you killed, my friend/I knew you in this dark...' The above lines are taken from...

Jean Rhys' late, literary masterpiece "Wide Sargasso Sea" was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

An enduringly popular classic of children’s fiction, The Coral Island tells the story of three boys stranded on a seemingly idyllic desert island. Thoughtful Ralph, clever, brave Jack and mischievous Peterkin soon find, however, that their new home has more than a few surprises in store! Wayne Forester’s energetic reading brings this classic adventure vividly to life. The Coral Island inspired a whole genre of adventure literature, influencing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The Great Indian Novel, as author Dr. Shashi Tharoor has mentioned, takes its title not from the author's estimate of its contents but in deference to its primary source of inspiration, the ancient epic the Mahabharata. In Sanskrit, Maha means great and Bharata means India.

Omeros is a 1990 epic poem by Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott The epic is set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Although its name is Omeros (Homer in Greek) it has just a minor touch of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The narrative of Omeros is multilayered. Walcott focuses on no single character; rather, many critics have taken the "hero" of Omeros to be the island of St. Lucia itself. The narrative draws heavily on the legacy of the Homeric epics; Book One even opens with an invocation of the Greek poet, who is likened to the blind character, Seven Seas. However, while many characters within the epic derive their appellations from Homeric characters, this is the only absolute correlation; the themes are Homeric in inspiration, but the story does not imitatively follow the plot of either the Iliad or the Odyssey.

4. “His life was gentle and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, 'This was a man !'”
Who is the speaker, and about whom is this spoken ?

Julius Caesar Act V. Scene VMarc ANTONY This was the noblest Roman of them all:All the conspirators save only heDid that they did in envy of great Caesar;He only, in a general honest thoughtAnd common good to all, made one of them.His life was gentle, and the elementsSo mix'd in him that Nature might stand upAnd say to all the world 'This was a man!'

5. “When my love swears that she is made of truth/I do believe her, though I know she lies”. The author of these lines is...

Strategic essentialism, a major concept in postcolonial theory was introduced by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It refers to a strategy that nationalities, ethnic groups or minority groups can use to present themselves. While strong differences may exist between members of these groups, and amongst themselves they engage in continuous debates, it is sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily 'essentialize' themselves and bring forward their group identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals.

11. Which of the following statements is the most accurate regarding Edward Said's thesis in Orientalism ?

(i) The Europeans used the East dialectically to describe their self-image as irrational and primitive.
(ii) The Oriental people used the West dialectically to define their self-image as irrational and primitive.
(iii) The Europeans used the East oppositionally to define their self-image as rational and modern.
(iv) The Oriental people used the West oppositionally to define their self-image as rational and modern.

(A) (iii)
(B) (iv)
(C) (i) and (iv)
(D) (ii) and (iii)

12.Assertion (AST) : Literary and historical periodization often has nothing to do with the lifetime of writers. Thus we see two writers born in the same year belonging to two separate periods.

Reasoning/ (R) : Thomas Carlyle and John Keats were born in 1795. In standard literary histories, Example: Keats is a Romantic and Carlyle, a Victorian.

(A) (AST) and (R) are correct
(B) (AST) is correct; (R) is incorrect
(C) (AST) and (R) are incorrect
(D) (R) does not follow from (AST)

13. Everyman is...

(A) a medieval play based on an episode from the Bible
(B) a medieval morality play
(C) a Tudor interlude
(D) a miracle play

14. Which of the following sets would you call the poets of the Movement ?

"Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy, dedicated to the memory of Edward King, a college mate of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637.“Adonaïs”: A pastoral elegy on the Death of John Keats written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and most well-known works“In Memoriam” is a poem by the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, completed in 1849. It is a requiem for the poet's Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833.Thyrsis is the title of a poem written by Matthew Arnold in December 1865 to commemorate his friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had died in November 1861 aged only 42.

22. Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison is a series of reflections on:

(A) A French narrative
(B) A Dutch narrative
(C) A German narrative
(D) None of the above

Faustus is a timeless myth pointing directly at the universal truth inherent to our misguided and blasphemous penchant for an ultimate sort of knowledge and power. The idea of an individual selling his or her soul to the devil for knowledge is an old motif in Christian folklore, one that had become attached to the historical persona of Johannes Faustus, a disreputable astrologer who lived in Germany sometime in the early 1500s. The immediate source of Marlowe's play seems to be the anonymous German work Historia von D. Iohan Fausten of 1587, which was translated into English in 1592, and from which Marlowe lifted the bulk of the plot for his drama.

27. Who among the following were associated with the Irish Dramatic Movement ?

Phrase: Wooden leg- It comes from the time of the old sailors and pirates where an infamous one had a wooden leg and could drink his rum like no other. Hence the term, wooden leg, is still used for someone who drinks a lot.

44. “He is not fully recognized at home; he is not recognized at all abroad. Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of __________ is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly most considerable in our language.” To whom does Matthew Arnold refer in the above statement ?

Read the following passage carefully, and select the right answers from the alternatives given below in the questions 46 to 50 :

We need to begin by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the notion of literature. The mere fact that the word exists, or that an academic institution has been built around it, does not mean that the thing itself is self-evident.

Reasons perfectly empirical ones, to begin with are not hard to find. The full history of the word literature and its equivalents in all languages and all eras has yet to be written, but even a perfunctory look at the question makes it clear that the term has not been around forever. In the European languages, the word literature in its current sense is quite recent: it dates back just barely to the nineteenth century. Might we be dealing with a historical phenomenon rather than an 'eternal' one? Moreover, many languages (many African languages, for example) have no generic term covering all literary productions. To these initial observations we may add the fragmentation characteristic of literature today. Who dares specify what literature is and what is not, given the irreducible variety of the writing that tends to be attached to it, from vastly different perspectives?

The argument is not conclusive: a notion may legitimately exist even if there is no specific term in the lexicon for it. But we have been led to cast the first shadow of doubt over the 'naturalness' of literature. A theoretical examination of the problem proves no more reassuring. Where do we come by the conviction that there is indeed such a thing as literature? From experience, we study 'literary' works in school, then in college; we find the 'literary' type of book in specialized stores; we are in the habit of referring to 'literary' authors in everyday conversation. An entity called 'literature' functions at the level of intersubjective and social relations; this much seems beyond question. Fine. But what have we proved? That in the broader system of a given society or culture, an identifiable element exists that is known by the label literature. Have we thereby demonstrated that all the particular products that take on the function of 'literature' possess common characteristics, which we can identify with legitimac? Not at all.

46. This passage casts doubt on:

(A) the assumption called literature.
(B) the idea of literature.
(C) the institution of literature.
(D) the notion of literature.

47. Literature is unsustainable because :...

(A) we are unclear as to what it means.
(B) we are unsure as to its message.
(C) we are not persuaded that the claims made for it are allowable and acceptable.
(D) we cannot prove that its definitions are the right and the only possible ones.

48. How does the writer argue that the existence of literature is hardly self-evident?

(i) by citing reasons for its non-existence.
(ii) by citing reasons for interrogating its legitimacy.
(iii) by citing reasons and proving by argument that its legitimacy can be interrogated.
(iv) by citing reasons to show that the label does not match the thing we know to be literature.

(A) (i)
(B) (i) and (ii)
(C) (iii)
(D) (iii) and (iv)

49. “Might we be dealing with a historical phenomenon rather than an 'eternal' one”? What makes this a
reasonable question to consider in this context?

(A) A historical phenomenon lends itself to better empirical verification than an 'eternal' one.
(B) A historical phenomenon has more legitimacy than an 'eternal' one.
(C) A historical phenomenon can be debated and possibly settled while an 'eternal' one must be taken
on trust or not at all.
(D) historical phenomenon is well above disputation while an 'eternal' one is not.

50.What does ‘the fragmentation characteristic of literature today' suggest to the writer ?

(A) the fragmentation of modern consciousness.
(B) the divided perceptions of literature by its readers.
(C) the lack of specificity of literature.
(D) the blur that frustrates further investigation into this concept.

2 comments:

ans of 50. could be either C or D. not B. because it talks of reader while ques is about writer. moreover writer says lack of specificity in literature. wat is and wat isn't lit is the ques. so either it refers to blurr prempting defnition.